The Milky Way Might Host A Massive Wormhole- New Research Paper Suggests

1/26/2015

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Our very own Milky Way could host a huge bridge in space-time.
At least, that’s what the authors of a recent study have suggested. According
to the group, teamwork between Indian, Italian, and North American scientists
at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy, the central disk
of Milky Way may host the necessary dark matter to support the formation and nourishment
of a “stable and controllable” tunnel to a distant section of space-time –known
as a wormhole. The group’s study was issued in the November 2014 issue of Annals
of Physics. A pre-print of this research paper is also available at arxiv.org.

Wormholes (also known as Einstein- Rosen Bridge) were first theorized
by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935. Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen
suggested their idea as a way to get around the notion of black hole singularities.
Rather than making a knot of infinite density, Einstein and Rosen believed, the
immense energy inherent in such a huge body would twist space-time to such a degree
that it bent over on itself, permitting a bridge to generate between two detached
regions of the Universe. Unfortunately, these wormholes would be tremendously
unstable and would need huge amounts of “negative energy” to stay open.

A graphic of the arrangement of a hypothesized wormhole (Credit:
NASA)

But according to the research group at SISSA, huge amounts
of dark matter could deliver this required fuel. By means of a model of dark
matter’s richness that is founded on the rotation curves of other spiral
galaxies, the scientists established that the scattering of dark matter in the
Milky Way produced explanations in general relativity that would, hypothetically,
permit a stable wormhole to arise. Paulo Salucci, an astrophysicist on the group
from SISSA, described: “If we combine the map of the dark matter in the Milky
Way with the most recent Big Bang model to explain the universe and we
hypothesise the existence of space-time tunnels, what we get is that our galaxy
could really contain one of these tunnels, and that the tunnel could even be
the size of the galaxy itself. But there’s more. We could even travel through
this tunnel, since, based on our calculations, it could be navigable. Just like
the one we’ve all seen in the recent film Interstellar.” Obviously, Salucci and
the other scientists were working on this task long before Interstellar was
released, but their outcome does provide some theoretical backing to the concepts
in the film – concepts that were also fact-tested and reviewed by physics guru
Kip Thorne of Caltech.

The authors of this research paper consider that their
result strengthens the significance of discerning the accurate nature of dark
matter. According to Salucci, “Dark matter may be ‘another dimension’, maybe
even a main galactic passage system. In any case, we really need to start
asking ourselves what it actually is.” Salucci continued, “Obviously we’re not
claiming that our galaxy is definitely a wormhole, but simply that, according
to theoretical models, this hypothesis is a possibility.” The scientists went
on to describe that their notion could be verified experimentally by relating
our own Milky Way, a spiral galaxy, with a neighboring galaxy of a different
type. By equating the dark matter dispersals between the two galaxies, researchers
would possibly be able to use general relativity to probe variances in their space-time
dynamics.